SOLVED as a Service

Solutions to technical problems with open source software that I use. I post these so that the next time I encounter the same problem and do an Internet search, my own post will come up; this has now actually happened several times. If these posts help others, that’s a bonus.

in your .gitconfig would solve this problem in a nice targeted way, but it won’t, so don’t bother. See here for some discussion about that.

(This post is part of my SOLVED as a Service series, in which I post solutions to technical problems with open source software that I use. The point is the next time I encounter the same problem and do an Internet search, my own post will come up; this has now actually happened several times. If these posts help others, that’s a bonus.)

This is a public service announcement for anyone else who runs WordPress straight from SVN trunk and found their site broken after upgrading recently (probably after svn update took their site across the WordPress 4.1 boundary), such that instead of showing recent posts on the front page, you would see only this message:

I haven’t analyzed this in depth, but here’s what I think is going on:

The workaround implemented by that line (that is, setting ‘value’ explicitly albeit only to the empty string, in order to get the right SQL result) is what’s recommended by WordPress bug #23268. However, that bug was fixed in changeset 27689, which (confusingly to those of us not accustomed to development involving multiple SVN trees, yikes) made it to http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk in r27528:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r27528 | wonderboymusic | 2014-03-24 14:57:15 -0500 (Mon, 24 Mar 2014) | 10 lines
Changed paths:
M /trunk/wp-includes/meta.php
When using `meta_query` in a `WP_Query`, passing `NOT EXISTS` or `''`
to `compare` should not require `value` to be set. The resulting SQL
should then produce the appropriate `OR` clause for existence of
non-existence after passing the query to the `$key_only_queries` stack
internally.
Adds unit tests.
Props chrisguitarguy, for the original patch.
Fixes #23268.
Built from https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk@27689
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, so the bug was fixed in WordPress core, and when I updated, I got the fix.

Unfortunately, the stealth-publish plugin hasn’t gotten the memo yet. That plugin’s latest version is 2.4, and hasn’t been updated since January 2014 — a couple of months before the relevant WP core bugfix. And the workaround in the code is now not only unnecessary, but actually causes an SQL syntax error — which is probably reasonable, since passing a value doesn’t really make sense in a NOT EXISTS test. It’s just that anyone who was using the workaround needs to stop doing so immediately.

I hope that stealth-plugin is still being maintained by its author. It’s hard to tell right now because the stealth-publish home page is currently down for maintenance:

This post is a public service announcement for all those using GNOME 3.14 or higher (in my case on Debian GNU/Linux, although that detail probably doesn’t matter here).

I wanted to get rid of the workspace switcher popup. That’s the thing that looks like this and displays briefly whenever you switch workspaces:

I do not know what that thing is for. It serves no purpose that I can see. When I go from one workspace to another, I am interested in the destination. Whether I moved conceptually “up” or “down” from another workspace to get there is utterly irrelevant — the popup is just visual noise on my screen, getting between me and wherever I was going. (And by the way, they’re not “up” and “down” in my mind anyway; they’re “left” and “right”. We’ll never understand each other, GNOME. We’re too different.)

A long time ago I disabled that popup, using Windsor Schmidt’s handy Disable Workspace Switcher Popup extension. I just put it into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/disable-workspace-switcher-popup@github.com/, launched gnome-tweak-tool, went to the Extensions tab, enabled the new extension, restarted GNOME, built my own backhoe, and voilà, the workspace switcher popup stopped appearing. Or maybe it was the other order? I don’t know. It seems like an awfully complicated procedure, in retrospect, but anyway it worked.

Then recently, after I upgraded to GNOME 3.14, it stopped working — that is, the workspace switcher popup came back.

Here’s what I had to do to suppress it again:

Add “3.14” to the list of supported shell versions in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/disable-workspace-switcher-popup@github.com/metadata.json. In other words, I edited this line, adding the “3.13” and “3.14” on the end:

Looks like I’m not the only person to have run into this problem. Oskari Saarenmaa opened pull request #6 for this — which I didn’t even see before I created basically the same patch in pull request #7, but my patch supports GNOME 3.13 as well, for whatever that’s worth. (Was GNOME 3.13 ever released? I don’t even know, but if it was, my PR will support it. Yay.)

Why this stuff (along with similar things like disabling window animations when switching workspaces) isn’t tweakable via mouse clicks starting from Settings, I don’t understand. I guess you can launch dconf-editor and gnome-tweak-tool, if you’re the kind of person who knows about such things, but GNOME users shouldn’t have to be the kind of person who knows about such things.

Anyway, here endeth the public service announcement. This is how you can disable the workspace switcher popup in GNOME 3.14. Got that, search engine indexes? Good.

This post is for people who install Debian GNU/Linux and run into this error at the GRUB installation step:

Executing 'grub-install /dev/sda' failed.
This is a fatal error ...

Solution: remove the USB stick from which you are installing Debian. Right now it’s /dev/sda and the target hard drive you’re trying to install to is /dev/sdb (during the installation process only). This has bitten me more than once.

Yes, seriously: the Debian installer apparently can’t figure out on its own that most likely the place you want to install the boot loader is on the huuuuuuuuge hard drive that you’ve been installing to all this time, not on the USB stick that you’ve been installing from.

I can totally understand how new research in AI would be needed to solve that problem.

This post is for people who use Redmine; others are welcome to stay for the ride if they wish.

I’m writing this post mainly so it will turn up in results when people do a web search to find out how to edit multiple issues at once in Redmine (e.g., search://redmine batch edit multiple issues/). I recently did that search, to no avail, and was stumped until someone gave me the answer in IRC.

It turns out the feature is there, a bit hard to find, and more powerful than I expected. Here’s the email I sent to my colleagues about it (lightly edited). I’m too lazy to even make screenshots, but the prose recipe should suffice:

From: Karl Fogel
To: The Team
Subject: Most incredible Redmine hint ever.
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:40:56 -0400
For those using the Redmine issue tracker:
I don't normally like to spam lists with random UI hints, but in this
case, there is a very powerful capability in Redmine that you probably
won't spot unless someone tells you about it -- I myself just found it
out from "_Mischa_The_Evil" in IRC [...].
You can batch-edit a set of issues simultaneously -- change statuses,
assignees, whatever -- by selecting them from an issues list and then
right-clicking in the selection (highlighted blue area). For example:
* Go to http://developer.civiccommons.org/projects/mktplc/issues
* Select some issues using their checkboxes
(or, use top-of-column green checkmark to select all)
* Put your mouse in the blue selected area.
* Notice how your mouse pointer has a funny stacky-looking icon
next to it suddenly. Those crazeeee Redmine developers!
* Right-click, see the magical choices available to you now.
* Weep for joy. My god, it's full of stars...
As there is no hint in the page content that this latent ability is
there, I thought I'd better just mail about it.
-Karl

In a followup comment in IRC, after reading this post, _Mischa_The_Evil said:

kfogel: :), nice one… btw: you can also multi-select by clicking anywhere on the issueline (not in inside links) combined with browser-dependent key. Most are ctrl-leftclick. I remember Opera being alt-rightclick (at least in the past, i remember reading something about changing it not so long a ago).